Riddick PC demo escapes
Never been to Butcher Bay? You should, it's lovely.
Although the game itself has been out on Xbox since last summer and PC since before Christmas, it's taken VU Games and Starbreeze this long to sort out a demo version of The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape From Butcher Bay - one of our favourite games of 2004.
It's out now, though, and it leaves anybody who wasn't taken in by the widespread critical acclaim with little excuse not to give it a run out. (And to admire the pretty blatant 'borrowing' of the Metal Gear Solid theme for the main background tune.) It's also a nice opportunity for PC-owning fans of the Xbox version to see how much nicer it looks running on high-end kit. Not that the Xbox did a bad job of it; it may not have started the "normal mapping" craze, but Riddick was the first game out of the door in the US market to support it, and looked fantastic. Fantastically grim and evil, mind you.
Anyway, the PC demo weighs in at around 200MB and you can get hold of it from 3D Gamers here. You'll need a minimum of a 1.8GHz processor with 256MB RAM and a 64MB graphics card to get it going, and the demo consists of the Mainframe level, which a quick reccy reveals to be the one where Riddick pounces on an unsuspecting technician, gets hold of a proper guard's gun for the first time and then runs around causing mischief.
The full game is bristling with different ideas drawn from first-person shooters, stealth action and action-adventure games, and we liked it so much we reviewed it about 75 times. You can read our original US review of the Xbox version here, with the PC version reviewed here.